Music is always in my head, from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep (and probably in-between). My dad is a musician and runs a recording studio on Bainbridge Island called The Brickyard Studio and because of my parent’s love of the arts I have been extremely privileged with my level of exposure to music. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been writing songs - or fragments of them - and now that I have found my voice, write songs that I am proud of, and play guitar, I’m enjoying recording some of them in my dad’s studio. Over the past few years, I’ve written a bunch of songs, but the ones below are a few that I feel especially good about.

This song is about my hardships as well as my friends' struggles in quarantine. In it, I tried to capture the feelings of loneliness and introspection that prevailed during this period. Formatted with just a verse of two stanzas followed by a chorus of two stanzas, the instrumentation starts out light and fluid, moving through different melody lines in the bass line, guitar, and vocals, before quickly transitioning to a more grungy and emotional chorus. I played all of the guitars and did all of the vocals on this song as well as played the tuba pad that you can hear in the background of the verse.

This is a song I wrote about Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston for an English class project my Junior year. Challenging myself to write something about a specific topic actually made this a really fun song to write and one that I really like. In this song, I focused on the themes of individualism and independence that are prominent throughout the book. I also often referenced the symbols of the horizon (symbolizing the realm of the possible), the pear tree (symbolizing a sense of possibility), and the hurricane (the all-powerful force of nature). This song, formatted: verse, pre-chorus bridge thing, verse, pre-chorus bridge thing, chorus, builds using simple but careful instrumentation and lyrics. This is more of a demo because it was just for my English class. I have rewritten some of the lyrics and plan to re-record and finish it soon so I can release it. 

Violet is the first song I recorded in the studio with my dad. I recorded it right at the beginning of our quarantine in March of 2020 when there was a lot of social turmoil. It was not only the first song I have written that I liked enough to share with my dad, but it also really inspired me to get to work more seriously on my music. This song is about a friend who was feeling a lot of social pressure and I wrote it as a sort of encouragement to stand up for who you are. It is a little outdated, I would need to change some of the lyrics if I ever want to release it but I think it's a really great song nonetheless and it also shows a little bit of my progression as a musician and a writer.